Comfort

Gamdias has done an incredible job at combining style with ergonomics. Ear cup and head pads are very soft and put almost no pressure on your ears, I would not say they are memory foam but the material is low resilience. The ear cups comfortable wrap around my entire ear, so much that the top of my ear is not mashed against my head. With hours of continuous use my ears remain strain free and at an adequate temperature thanks to the cooling system that I will get into later.

Will you forget that you have Hephaestus on? Probably not, they are a little on the heavy side and are quite bulky overall especially around the ear cups.

Sound and Voice Quality

For headsets sound quality is a big factor, the Gamdias Hephaestus features top notch quality which is further enhanced by its vibration feature. The Hephaestus only offers a USB connection but it still manages to have crystal clear sound all the way to max volume with no distortion or rattling on music with heavy bass. The highs and lows all remain clear and never get too sharp and the midrange sounds remain excellent all throughout. In terms of bass, the Hephaestus was pretty average when the vibration feature was off. The low bass for these headphones really shine when vibration is turn on to maximum on the controller and the volume is set to max, it makes your hair stand up. It is crucial to understand that this headset is Digital 7.1 when testing out the sound quality.

Voice quality had no complaints from friends on the other side. Everything from a whisper to yelling was heard loud and clear. The noise cancelling mic is not a gimmick, it actually cancels out low hums and chatter in the background when I played back a recorded sample of myself.

Feature Testing

Blast Source Vibration Identifier

This feature really makes the Hephaestus a unique offering in the headset market. It really delivers some hair raising, ear shattering vibrations through your head. Listening to heavy bass music gets very tense as the bass drop inches closer and brings to you an earthquake of vibration and bass. The main concern is how loud I had to set the volume simply to get the vibrations to sound, on a mp3 I had to set the windows volume to 70 to really feel the vibrations during heavy bass sections. Same issue occurred during gaming, even at max vibration I would not hear it unless the in-game volume was close to max. Setting the volume to high simply to get the vibration feature to work gets a little annoying and often left me with a small headache after a gaming session.

Cooler System

At first I giggled at the fact of a headset having a built in heat sink to dissipate heat. To my astonishment it actually works, in the midst of summer and in a warm room my ears remained at a comfortable temperature. I never had to stop and remove the headsets to wipe off sweat or re arrange them. I’m not exactly sure how this feature works but it does its job and I can see why Gamdias advertised it on the front of the Hephaestus packaging.

Software

A software disc is not included with the headset which is not a problem. if you want to get the full audio quality you’ll have to install it off the Gamdias website because the default windows driver does not include all the features for digital audio. In terms of the software itself, it leaves a lot to be desired. The scheme is very basic, nothing to identify that you are using the software for the almighty Gamdias Hephaestus. The software includes straightforward options that an audiophile may find interesting, the feature I played with the most is the digital surround sound shifter where you can move the speakers around to your liking. Overall the software is pretty generic and is most likely recycled from another headset. I did not play with the options too much but the following is some of the stuff one can play around with.